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The Texas German Dialect Project Berkeley Linguistics Society . 2002. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/bls.v28i1.3853 28 Published by the Linguistic Society of America Tracing Dialect Death: The Texas German Dialect Project HANSC. BOAS University of Texas at Austin 0. Introduction This paper reports on current efforts of the Texas German Dialect Project to record, archive, and analyze the remnants of the rapidly eroding Texas German dialect spoken in central Texas. 1 The paper is structured as follows. Section one gives a brief history of German settlements in central Texas. Section two presents in detail the on-going activities of the Texas German Dialect Project. They include conducting fieldwork in three representative speech communities and the creation of an on-line digital archive of Texas German. Section three discusses the change of a selected number of lexical, morphological, syntactic, and phonological features of Texas German that took place over the last four decades. More specifically, it compares data from thirty to forty years ago with data recorded during current fieldwork in fall of 2001 and spring of 2002. Finally, section four gives an overview of research questions that the Texas German Dialect Project will be tackling as it will be collecting and analyzing more data over the coming years. 1. Brief History of German Settlements in Central Texas The Texas German speakers who live across central Texas are in large part the descendants of settlers that started emigrating from Germany beginning around 1830 (Biesele 1928, Salmons 1983). 2 The first large group of about 5000 settlers came to Texas in 1845/46 as part of an organized effort by the "Society for the Protection of German Immigrants to Texas" that was organized by a group of German noblemen with the goal of systematically settling Germans in Texas. The different dialects of the settlers' native homes in geographically diverse places such as Hesse, Hesse-Nassau, Rhenish Prussia, Westphalia, and Hannover 1 The Texas German Dialect Project (TGDP) gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Dean of Liberal Arts, the Vice President for Research, and the Center for Instructional Technologies, all of the University of Texas at Austin. 2 According to Gilbert (1965), the majority of Texas German speakers "are located in the eastern part of the state between Austin and Houston and on the eastern part of the Edwards Plateau west of Austin and San Antonio" (1965: 102). 387 Hans C. Boas formed the basis from which the dialects of New Braunfels, Fredericksburg, and other Texas German communities evolved (cf. Eike! (1949: 278), Gilbert (1965: 102)). Because of their isolation at the western frontier, these towns became important regional cultural centers which enabled German immigrants and their descendants to maintain their culture and language for an exceptionally long time (Salmons 1983, Guion 1996, Boas, in press). However, due to the wave of anti-German sentiment caused by the two World Wars, the prestige of German in the United States suffered severe blows and the generally stable linguistic situation of Texas German began to collapse.3 The social, demographic, and economic changes that took place in central Texas following World War II led to schooling exclusively in English in a culture that had an extensive system of German schools.4 Moreover, English gained in prestige among younger speakers because of the practical and economic advantages associated with being primarily English-speaking (Salmons 1983, Guion 1996, Boas, in press). The decline in prestige associated with speaking Texas German led to the dialect not being transmitted to children to any significant extent. Whereas for generations Texas German was acquired in early childhood at home, this form of transmission disappeared in the years following World War II. The continuation of these trends over the last five decades has resulted in a sharp decrease in the number of fluent Texas German speakers, thereby causing a rapid language shift to English in the Texas German community. At present, English has become the primary language for most Texas Germans in both private and public domains, whereas the reverse would still have been true as late as the 1940s (Salmons 1983, Boas, in press). As Guion (1996) points out: The last two environments outside the home that afforded a possibility of speaking German, namely business transactions and church, have been lost. Presently, the only surviving register is an informal, familial one. It is important to note here that German is strictly used for oral purposes. The only written German found in German-speaking homes is an occasional family Bible. English is the sole language written by the people interviewed (p.44 7). The remaining number of fluent Texas German speakers in central Texas, most of whom are age 60 or older, is estimated to be between 6-7000 (compared to ca. 70,000 in the early 1960s, according to Gilbert (1965: 102)) (see Boas (in 3 See Eike! (1949) and Salmons (1983) for a more detailed discussion. 4 One of the most influential measures affecting the prestige of Texas German has probably been the passing of English-only laws by the Texas Legislature at the beginning of World War I. This legislation required English to be the language of instruction in public schools as well as for all official transactions (Guion 1996: 444). Although in 1938 the English-only policies were loosened to allow for instruction in German above the second grade, the prestige of Texas German had already suffered severe blows such that "the young people [who) had been schooled in English( ... ) could much more easily identify with the more prestigious English and disappear into the melting pot" (Salmons 1983: 188). 388 Tracing Dialect Death press)). The rapidly shrinking number of fluent Texas German speakers as well as the limited domains and registers of use puts this dialect on the list of about 1200 moribund dialects world-wide that are expected to go extinct within the next 20- 25 years (see Crystal (2000)). 2. The Texas German Dialect Project (TGDP) As a response to this situation, the Texas German Dialect Project (henceforth TGDP) was founded in September 2001 with the goal of recording, archiving, and analyzing the remnants of the rapidly eroding Texas German dialect. The following sections give an overview of the work flow of the TGDP. The first step in setting up the TGDP consisted of collecting and reviewing all publicly available previous work on Texas German. The purpose of this preliminary phase was to identiJ}1 the relevant linguistic features of Texas German recorded by earlier studies in order to set up procedures that would allow for eliciting as much relevant data from informants as possible. 2.1. Design of Questionnaire The second step was to derive a strategy that would allow for a broad-scale collection of natural data representing the largest possible number of linguistic features of Texas German. One option considered for collecting data consisted of using structured word lists and sentences to be translated by informants from English to German. In addition, structured word lists and sentences in German were considered for serving as a basis for eliciting information on how informants pronounced words and sentences differently. However, due to their narrow scope (each covered only a limited number of words and sentences), both methods would have only yielded a limited amount of linguistic information. Another disadvantage of this approach is that the data collected would not have been elicited in a natural setting. That is, the informants' daily use of Texas German would not have been replicated or understood by simply having them read or translate structured word and sentence lists. In order to overcome these problems, an eight page long questionnaire was drafted to serve as a basis for sociolinguistic interviews that are more thorough. The first section of the questionnaire contains questions about informants' personal history (date and place of birth, place of origin of informants' ancestors, etc.). The second section of the questionnaire consists of about 140 questions in German about topics including childhood activities, the community, religion, education, living conditions, tourism, government, language, and current activities. The goal of these questions is to produce casual, relaxed conversation in which informants are given the chance to talk naturally. The final section of the 5 For an overview, see the works cited in the bibliography at the end of this paper. 389 Hans C. Boas questionnaire contains twenty English sentences that informants are asked to translate into German. 6 Thus, conducting sociolinguistic interviews with open-ended questions enables data to be gathered on informants' natural speech, as opposed to the artificial/simulated speech imposed by the structured word and sentence lists of previous studies (e.g., Eikel (1967), Gilbert (1972)). Furthermore, by allowing informants to speak freely it becomes possible to discover new linguistic features of Texas German that may have previously gone unnoticed because elicitation methods for them were not included in the research methodology of previous studies. 2.2. The interview process Since the majority of previous studies are concerned with the Texas German varieties spoken in and around Fredericksburg (Gilbert 1963, 1965, 1972, Salmons 1983, Guion 1996) and New Braunfels (Eikel 1949, 1954, 1965, 1967), both towns were natural choices in which to begin fieldwork. Informants were found through a social network tracing process beginning with students at the University of Texas at Austin. Through students enrolled in my classes during the academic year 2001/2002 I was able to make contact with their family members or friends who were at least third generation Texas German speakers residing in Fredericksburg and New Braunfels. Furthermore, colleagues in my department helped me to establish contact with informants in two other locations, namely Round Rock and Freyburg.
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